Word: courtiers
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...metaphors "bear deeply on a sexual relationship that may have some resemblance to that of my par ents, regardless of whatever literary connotations may be brought to it." Miss Stevens is at her best describing the physical and intellectual ventures of her father - the failed newspaper reporter, the awkward courtier, the relentless reader and overheated connoisseur of painting and music. As for the public burgher, he too is shown in seedling form, as an honorable 19th century fig ure who believed that there was some thing disreputable about a poet who did not earn his own living. It is only...
...grainy. It favors continuous, compressed shapes with a strong axis along the grain. Anything that sticks sideways from the block-an arm, say-is weak and splits off. Hence the elongated, torpedo-like form of a Shinto deity from Japan's Kamakura period (12th-14th centuries)-a courtier, oddly clownlike in his peaked cap and baggy pants, but carved with a reductive formal elegance that might have inspired Brancusi seven centuries later. All its shapes are circumscribed by the block; one could roll it downhill...
...which that conflict is realized, attains to a high dramatic intensity, thanks both to Miller's finesse and a superlative performance by Dan Riviera as Thomas Cromwell. In a world populated almost exclusively by shifty, power-crazed and unreliable characters, Riviera's Cromwell outshifts them all. Here is a courtier who could have given Machiavelli lessons. His fingers heavy with rings, his mouth twitching contempt, Riviera is every inch the master of ruthless pragmatism, as uncomfortable with More's unswerving integrity as More is with the vicissitudes of court politics...
...jubilantly announced his museum's acquisition of Rembrandt's Doop van de Kamerling (The Baptism of the Moor), the artist's second oldest known work. Painted in 1626 when Rembrandt was only 19, the 25-in. by 19-in. discovery depicts the baptism of an Ethiopian courtier by Deacon Philip, as recounted in Acts 8. Defoer, 39, declined to name the painting's last owner or the purchase price. But he made no secret of his own pleasure at the acquisition. Burbled the scholar: "A work of this magnitude one finds only once in five lifetimes...
...double-dealer whose inward writhings cause him more annoyance than pain. Hand on hips, he delights in running his tongue over his lips in a gesture that reduces him to the level of a snake. It's hard to imagine what either queen could see in such an effeminate courtier...